Modern computing devices have become ubiquitous tools for personal, business, and social uses. As such, many modern computing devices are capable of connecting to various data networks, including the Internet and corporate intranets, to retrieve and transmit/receive data communications over such networks. To facilitate communications between computing devices, networks typically include one or more network devices (e.g., a network switch, a network router, etc.) to route communications from one computing device to another.
Software-defined networking (SDN) is a networking architecture that may be used to facilitate communications (i.e., the flow of network packets) across the network using network devices. In a software-defined network, an externally located SDN controller is connected to the network to make the network traffic flow logic decisions for the network packets across the network, a task traditionally performed at the network device level. As such, network packet processing (e.g., network traffic flow logic) previously performed on dedicated network processors of the network devices may now be processed on network devices with general purpose processors, thereby reducing the complexity of the hardware components necessary for network devices deployed in a software-defined network. Certain network packet payloads, or workload types, may be associated with certain network packets having a very large working size and/or that are only processed once after a header update (i.e., no cache reuse). Such network packets may be network or bandwidth intensive, which may result in poor performance of the network device in processing the network packets using the general purpose processor.